The ability to choose from a wide range of computing and storage services is one of cloud computing’s big draws, but saving money is probably even a bigger motivator. Amazon Web Services is trying to make this simpler by releasing an API providing pricing data for every AWS service, rather than just for the 13 selected services for which a pricing API became available last December.

Cloud pricing is dropping overall, and price-based competition among AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and other public-cloud services is “only just getting started,” said Owen Rogers, research director of the digital economics unit at New York-based 451 Research and keeper of the closely watched Cloud Price Index, in comments this fall. Azure chief Scott Guthrie in September said Azure’s long-running price war with AWS was winding down, but in fact both Azure and AWS have since offered price cuts.

“Now customers that are doing cost analysis around building cloud-based solutions or moving on-premises workloads to the cloud have easier access to the comprehensive price list of AWS services,” wrote Tara Walker, an AWS technical evangelist, in a blog post. “This will enable customer and partners to have greater control over the budgeting, forecasting and planning of their cloud solutions.”

AWS last week also started letting customers sign up to get emailed notifications of price cuts, new services and new instance types, either daily or as they occur.

Speaking of moving workloads to the cloud, AWS CEO Andy Jassy tweeted last week that 16,000 databases were migrated to AWS in 2016 using the Database Migration Service. That pace appears to be accelerating: he also said 2,000 databases were migrated to AWS in just the month that has passed since re:Invent.

16K database migrations via AWS Database Migration Service in 2016…2K in last month since #AWS#Reinvent. DB freedom is a powerful thing.

Dan Richman covers cloud technology, developer tools and enterprise software for GeekWire. He has been covering the news for more than 25 years, including a decade at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and writing for MSNBC and private newsletters. Reach him at drichman@geekwire.com and follow him @danielarichman.

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